Abstract:
Performance and redundancy requirements imposed on state-of-the-art unmmaned
combat aerial vehicles often lead to over-actuated systems with a mix
of conventional and novel moment generators. Consequently, control allocation
schemes have become a crucial part of the flight control architecture and
their design is now a growing problem. This thesis presents a four control
allocation scheme designed to meet multiple objectives and resolve objective
conflicts by finding the ‘Pareto’ optimal solution, namely; Weighted Control
Allocation, Minimax Control Allocation, Canonical Control Allocation and
Classical. This is defined as a solution to the multi-objective optimisation
problem which is non-dominated for all objectives. The scheme is applied to
a six degrees of freedom nonlinear simulation of an aircraft equipped with
conventional control surfaces as well as fluidic thrust vectoring and circulation
control. The results indicate a perfect allocation of the total control
demand onto the actuator suite.
